Reflections on 2004 pt.4+

I have been thinking of writing a bad/good, high/low, all-encompassing entry to cap my Reflections series.

There is a problem though…

The bad/low points are well out-weighed by the good/high points.

This has been a very good year for me.  I am finishing my sixth year here in this apartment, the longest I’ve lived in any one place ever. I’ve lived here in Portland most of the last 17 years.  I was born and spent the first 15 years of life in California but never felt like a California kid.  Oregon fits me better.  I love it here.

I can’t think of anything to legitimately bitch about.  I would love to get some, to have a girlfriend/partner/someone to share it all with.  That is, I suppose, my number one hope.

But if it doesn’t happen I will be ok too.  After all, we are born and we die alone- I can live alone too.

A much more realistic and probable event is that I will get another car in ’05.  The Social Security  thing will finally pay off and I will be able to afford a car.  A nice one, not some pos junker either.  I think it is much more likely that I will find “my” car than it is that I will find “my” woman.

And it will have been seven years since I got stupid and decided I could drive just fine, thank you, when I was drunk.  The DUII I rightly got will disappear from my driving record.  In the next year or two the suspensions will go away too.  My driving record, which was nearly perfect before the wreck and was trashed by it, will be reborn as nearly clean as it should be.

ALL of that stuff is so trivial compared to what millions of people are going through in southern Asia.  I deliver the paper and the headlines have screamed numbers of people killed or missing.  Those numbers were current when the paper was printed, but I get home and turn on the news and find that the number has grown exponetially.

These are interesting times to be a spectator, for sure.

There is a perspective to see and apply to my life here.  It could be worse very much applies to me and my situation.  The tsunami and it’s aftermath are a disaster that is almost bibilical in it’s proportions.

With that in the background, I’ve got nothing to bitch about.

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